Red Riding Hood is nothing like Twilight – except, of course, for the fact that it’s directed by Catherine Hardwicke, tells a tween-targeted supernatural story of a young featureless beauty (Amanda Seyfried’s Valerie) caught in a love triangle with two bland boys (one of whom may be a werewolf who shares a special bond with her), and features lots of chaste romantic brooding and misty-mountain scenery. Oh, and did I mention that said legendary werewolf also can’t come out in the daytime or enter Christian churches, just like vampires? Rarely has a project attempted to duplicate a trendy franchise’s every element in ways as transparent as this awful film, in which Valerie (aka Red Riding Hood) is torn between working-class Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) and wealthy arranged-husband Henry (Max Irons) in a medieval town where the parents are vapid, the guys are hunky, and the girls are catty and back-stabby. Once religious wolf-slaying zealot Solomon (a beyond-over-the-top Gary Oldman) arrives in town eager to burn anyone even related to the wolf, Hardwicke’s film (penned with overwrought clichés by David Johnson) turns into a whodunit in which suspicion is cast about with unbridled fervor. Is the wolf Peter? Henry? Valerie’s two-timing mom (Virginia Madsen)? Her big-eyed granny (Julie Christie)? Who cares? Valerie is such a milquetoast nobody and the beast is such an awful-looking CG creation that it’s hard not to root for their mutual destruction. However, between the laughably breathless writing, passionless paint-by-numbers romance, and matching slow-motion-and-erotic-electronica aesthetics, what truly needs abolishing is the notion that the wretched Twilight saga is worth emulating.
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